Former LAPA Fellow, 2008-2009Sharswood Fellow in Law and History, University of Pennsylvania Law School

While at LAPAChristopher Beauchamp has been named the 2008-2009 Microsoft Fellow. He is a historian of law, business, and technology, with a focus on the areas of intellectual property and regulation. He joins Princeton from New York University School of Law, where he is currently a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History. His doctoral dissertation, entitled "The Telephone Patents," used the history of Alexander Graham Bell’s patents to reconstruct the legal and economic contexts of intellectual property in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The dissertation received the Cromwell Dissertation Prize of the American Society for Legal History and was a finalist for the Coleman Prize of the Association of Business Historians and the Krooss Prize of the Business History Conference. Beauchamp received his B.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Cambridge University. At LAPA, he will be working on a book about patent law and litigation during the "second industrial revolution" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period that prefigured many of the issues vexing patent law and policy today.

Life after LAPA:

Christopher Beauchamp is currently a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property and legal history. His first book, Invented by Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patenting of the Second Industrial Revolution, is under contract with Harvard University Press. He is now working on a history of patent law and litigation in the United States, entitled Technology's Trials.